Phantom Dust |OT| Out of the ashes, into the Dust

wwm0nkey said:
Already have 20 hours in this game. So happy it was free and it seems a lot of new people are enjoying it a lot too
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Yeah I got about 10 hours in it and I hope it does get a sequel with a fix on everything that was wrong with the original.

I'll give it like a 7.5 or 8 out of 10...but maybe at the time of release I probably would of gave it an 8.5/10 because some things are really outdated.
 
jackissocool said:
In all my time with the game, it was just me and a couple friends. Tons of fun to see some real build variety now that I can play online. Hopefully it doesn't become impossible to find a match soon, cause I had trouble there for a little while.

Very excited to get a nice collection of cards so I can really put some crazy stuff together.
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One thing that worries me is the achievement rates. Pretty much all achievements are showing 0.0x% completion rate.

I fear people are just abandoning the game
 
It's the most frustrating thing ever when you start a match without any aura particles and you have to wait around for some to spawn.
 
Things I feel could be improves and changed in this game (for a potential sequel)

- Passive defensive cards would be a cool spin on the game, ie damage reduction.
- I really love the concept behind deck building, but it needs evolving into something entry level can pick up, but hard to master.
- The movement, jumping and general mobility could use more depth ie climbing, rolling, evading. Give the player more mobility.
- More skills at once, perhaps use LB button (like in Inquisition) to access another layer of cards ie 6 skills at a time = greater strategy.
- Instead of isolated arena mission, have connected open world environments for the campaign.
- For multiplayer I feel like large arenas would be so cool. Bridges, towers etc
 
I can get (some) people into a multiplayer lobby if I make it, but if I try to join an open game through Optimatch, I wait 30 seconds on the "joining a game session" screen before getting a "could not find a session" message. Very frustrating, because I want to try out some of these arsenals.
 
sonicmj1 said:
I can get (some) people into a multiplayer lobby if I make it, but if I try to join an open game through Optimatch, I wait 30 seconds on the "joining a game session" screen before getting a "could not find a session" message. Very frustrating, because I want to try out some of these arsenals.
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Might be your NAT/firewall?
 
"- The movement, jumping and general mobility could use more depth ie climbing, rolling, evading. Give the player more mobility."

Too many inherent mobility options takeaway from the usefulness of defensive/mobility skills.


"- More skills at once, perhaps use LB button (like in Inquisition) to access another layer of cards ie 6 skills at a time = greater strategy."

More skills available at once does not necessarily result in greater strategy, that's why card games tend to have hand limits. There's a balancing point between having enough skills available at once for the player to not feel hamstrung while not having so many skills at once that they don't have to make decisions on what to keep available.
 
Tekno gets it. The mobility options aren't meant to be defensive "get out of jail" free cards.

Jump is useful to get onto a place against AI and/or to jump over something from a higher level to a lower. Rolls and Cartwheels are meant to get away from rain or homing attacks (with timing) but not a slam-dunk sure-thing.

More skills aren't needed. You have your attack, defense skills on two buttons. Support (healing and the like) and evasion/mobility (if used) on the other two. I don't know why you'd need more since the Arsenals are more than enough able to cover you.

(Whoops meant to edit this in)
 
I am ripping my hair out - everyone jumping on the "bad game" train because the GB quicklook didn't really shine a good light on it and explained it badly. It's fine since Ben (who drove the QL) is playing the game his first time, but still...

"no wonder it's free"
"I guess we won't see another PD game then"
 
I think what could help to make the game better is to keep the four abilities limit, but make particles independent of your deck and spread over the map, possibly in various sizes and colours to denote points, that you only need to step into to pick up.

I also think including roll and climb would help to make the game a bit more dynamic as it affords players more options or closing distances so it's not just dudes hurling shit from a distance at each other.

Also, not entirely unrelated, but I'd fucking love a running power to run far as shit surrounded by lightning like The Flash, but that's just my the 7 year old part of my brain talking.
 
Rumblebones said:
I also think including roll and climb would help to make the game a bit more dynamic as it affords players more options or closing distances so it's not just dudes hurling shit from a distance at each other.
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Except there's "close" distance skills like Psycho Knife, Psycho Blade... that are extremely good if you get in close? You have cheap defense skills to let you get in on an enemy? You have erase skills to put a stop to those long distance (or short distance) attack skills AND have the ability to teleport into the enemy's spawn (or away from their spawn) to erase skills?

It's a card-game, you're never going to have all options. It's like me in Android: Netrunner, sometimes you have to run the servers without all your breakers if the Corp has 4-5 Agenda points so they aren't that far away from game-win/7 points.

RNG and "particles" are part of the game, like having to balance your Mana "Engine" in Magic: the Gathering.
 
Rumblebones said:
I think what could help to make the game better is to keep the four abilities limit, but make particles independent of your deck and spread over the map, possibly in various sizes and colours to denote points, that you only need to step into to pick up.
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No, balancing your options against your resources is an important part of deck-building in basically every TCG out there, and it's no less important here. There are arsenals that are quite successful and are designed to rely on minimized aura (as well as the opposite).

It should be noted that there are specifically skills out there to counter high aura and high level, as well as sap aura from opponents. How many aura particles are in your arsenal is a thing that you take into consideration as a strength and a weakness for more than simply your relative chances of getting them.

Rumblebones said:
I also think including roll and climb would help to make the game a bit more dynamic as it affords players more options or closing distances so it's not just dudes hurling shit from a distance at each other.
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Hey, guess what you can build an arsenal around.

Including too much mobility would trivialize the range and tracking aspects of a lot of skills - which is something that necessarily has to remain in a precarious balance for basically the entire game to work. Dashing, jumping, and buffing your movement speed (both permanently and temporarily) are things you can very much build an arsenal around. It wouldn't do well for the rest of the game if just everyone always had these options.

It's very important to realize how much depth this game has. Like any good trading card game, balancing your arsenal around a strategic paradigm - both in available resources as well as things you can actually do - are paramount to the game having any reasonable amount of depth. At the same time, what Phantom Dust is designed around and delivers on, is the fact that when it comes to actually playing the game, it's in 3D and in real-time - and every skill in the entire game takes this into account (some more than others). You have all of these options, and every single one of them is tightly bound to every single other option with regards to how feasible it is and needs to be. That's the core sign of a well-designed game.

Taking power away from decks and placing them directly into passive power that the player has innately is almost never a good idea, especially when building and using your deck is the game.

The only thing really stopping you from making high-speed CQC arsenal is what skills you've acquired, which is just a function of time, really. And I guess anyone with an arsenal designed to counter it - but that's going to be a constant (as it is in any TCG).
 
derFeef said:
I am ripping my hair out - everyone jumping on the "bad game" train because the GB quicklook didn't really shine a good light on it and explained it badly. It's fine since Ben (who drove the QL) is playing the game his first time, but still...

"no wonder it's free"
"I guess we won't see another PD game then"
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Eh you were going to get that anyway, I actually saw quite a few complaints about the video and a lot of people in the comments correcting Ben
 
Love the game, but have had a couple of issues in online matches recently.
1. I cant work out how to select my own arsenal, this is in quick match the option is greyed out.
2. At the start or a round if i get no attack powers or aura particle then i have to waste one of my other powers to get a particle and keep hoping one spawns. Had a frustrating game before where i could get on attack power or particle to spawn and a guy just constantly spamming psyco knife on me couldn't avoid it or get enough particles to use one of my defence or erase powers
 
scarlet0pimp said:
Love the game, but have had a couple of issues in online matches recently.
1. I cant work out how to select my own arsenal, this is in quick match the option is greyed out.
2. At the start or a round if i get no attack powers or aura particle then i have to waste one of my other powers to get a particle and keep hoping one spawns. Had a frustrating game before where i could get on attack power or particle to spawn and a guy just constantly spamming psyco knife on me couldn't avoid it or get enough particles to use one of my defence or erase powers
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1. Quick is a battle mode that assigns players 1 of 8 random arsenals. They are all new for the re-release and the builds can be found here. If you can't join non-Quick battles, it could be due to the fact that you haven't created a custom arsenal in the multiplayer mode.
2. If you don't like your starting hand, press the Options button on the controller, it will re-roll for you once, but do it during the 3 2 1 countdown. (Or ESC on PC)

Tip: Don't forget you can revive your teammate, go to their dead body and "capture" them, like a skill capsule and then press the button to revive them at 50% of their max health.
 
derFeef said:
I am ripping my hair out - everyone jumping on the "bad game" train because the GB quicklook didn't really shine a good light on it and explained it badly. It's fine since Ben (who drove the QL) is playing the game his first time, but still...

"no wonder it's free"
"I guess we won't see another PD game then"
Click to expand...

I had a similar frustration with Perfect Dark's reviews when it came out on XBLA. One of the reviewers gave it negative marks for having doors.
 
TheSeks said:
Except there's "close" distance skills like Psycho Knife, Psycho Blade... that are extremely good if you get in close? You have cheap defense skills to let you get in on an enemy? You have erase skills to put a stop to those long distance (or short distance) attack skills AND have the ability to teleport into the enemy's spawn (or away from their spawn) to erase skills?

It's a card-game, you're never going to have all options. It's like me in Android: Netrunner, sometimes you have to run the servers without all your breakers if the Corp has 4-5 Agenda points so they aren't that far away from game-win/7 points.

RNG and "particles" are part of the game, like having to balance your Mana "Engine" in Magic: the Gathering.
Click to expand...

Except I'm not talking about close distance abilities. I'm talking about movement and manoeuvrability to manage distances to use those abilities as well as evasion, though, granted, in that regard I'm thinking in terms of a sequel that plays a more frenetic pace, thus including more challenges in deck balancing.

Kent said:
No, balancing your options against your resources is an important part of deck-building in basically every TCG out there, and it's no less important here. There are arsenals that are quite successful and are designed to rely on minimized aura (as well as the opposite).

It should be noted that there are specifically skills out there to counter high aura and high level, as well as sap aura from opponents. How many aura particles are in your arsenal is a thing that you take into consideration as a strength and a weakness for more than simply your relative chances of getting them.
Click to expand...

I am well aware of this, thank you. The basis of my point isn't to refute to ignore the importance of proper deck management. It's suggesting particles as they are used in the game presently aren't necessarily a good thing. It works fine, it proposes some challenges to players, especially those that just want to stack their decks with high costing abilities, but I personally think it's a mechanic the game could do without, or could implement in a better way.


Kent said:
Hey, guess what you can build an arsenal around.

Including too much mobility would trivialize the range and tracking aspects of a lot of skills - which is something that necessarily has to remain in a precarious balance for basically the entire game to work. Dashing, jumping, and buffing your movement speed (both permanently and temporarily) are things you can very much build an arsenal around. It wouldn't do well for the rest of the game if just everyone always had these options.

It's very important to realize how much depth this game has. Like any good trading card game, balancing your arsenal around a strategic paradigm - both in available resources as well as things you can actually do - are paramount to the game having any reasonable amount of depth. At the same time, what Phantom Dust is designed around and delivers on, is the fact that when it comes to actually playing the game, it's in 3D and in real-time - and every skill in the entire game takes this into account (some more than others). You have all of these options, and every single one of them is tightly bound to every single other option with regards to how feasible it is and needs to be. That's the core sign of a well-designed game.

Taking power away from decks and placing them directly into passive power that the player has innately is almost never a good idea, especially when building and using your deck is the game.

The only thing really stopping you from making high-speed CQC arsenal is what skills you've acquired, which is just a function of time, really. And I guess anyone with an arsenal designed to counter it - but that's going to be a constant (as it is in any TCG).
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Not if balanced properly. You're assuming I would want these changes made in a vacuum. I don't. I'll try and be more clear on what my post what meant to get at: the game, fun as it is, is slow in ways I think make it dated. I would like it to be sped up more and for players to have abilities like NPCs to duck and dive, climb, run, and roll, and for abilities to be updated to scale with and adapt to those changes.

I think you need to stop looking at this game as a conventional TCG. It's not and never has been. Phantom Dust is a game that has TCG components, but at its core it's a third person action game, and I think those are generally more fun when they're a bit quicker than the game is presently, and I also the game would have been so originally if not for hardware limitations.
 
Rumblebones said:
Except I'm not talking about close distance abilities. I'm talking about movement and manoeuvrability to manage distances to use those abilities as well as evasion, though, granted, in that regard I'm thinking in terms of a sequel that plays a more frenetic pace, thus including more challenges in deck balancing
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Which is what I'm getting at: The game ALREADY lets you "get in" instead of "chucking fireballs at each other" like you say it promotes. It has close-range skills to get around the folks chucking fire-balls at you. Use them?
 
Getting past my initial revulsion, it's not necessarily impossible to make a game like Phantom Dust with a Gundam EX VS-esque system of expanded, fast movement. But for every system you shift away from deckbuilding and towards default player control, you remove some of the customization and complexity that makes deckbuilding fun. If aura is handled entirely separately from the arsenal, then my Vicious Balance strategy doesn't make sense, or I don't have to make choices in my deck composition based on how expensive I want my skills to be. If dodge moves are too powerful, then defensive skills become largely redundant, or reserved for special cases.

Maybe the better-feeling action you'd get in return would be worthwhile (I mean, in CCG terms, Hearthstone removed a lot of Magic's complexity in a way that got it a pretty sizeable audience). It's hard to say without seeing it in practice. But it's a tough balancing act either way, and I don't really mind where PD currently is.
 
Personally, the biggest change I would make is designing the maps more carefully around being constantly locked on. I wouldn't eliminate falling off map completely, but I'd certainly make sure it only happened because you screwed up and not becauase someone thought it'd be a good idea to realistically model a narrow stairwell over a fall, making it more irritating to navigate while locked on.
 
If this is all on the subject of a hypothetical follow up and not the current game...

Than I have to agree with the poster saying mobility should be enhanced. At the very least, Jump and roll should not be character specific abilities, they should be universal.

And while I understand the need to make sure the movement is balanced with skills so that defensive and specials that affect traversal aren't weakened or outight made useless, there is so much you could do with these skills moving forward that I don't believe it would end up an issue.

Take a skill like Dodge.

Ive used it in almost every arsenal I've ever made. It's the cornerstone of most of my strategies in this game. That said, it's one of the most basic moves in the game. Low cost, get it as soon as you start making arsenals, and it's common as dust.

Think about what could be altered just using that one skill and going from there:

A version of dodge that moves you underground like a crawl skill, completely avoiding projectiles and close range skills, but upon resurfacing leaves the user exposed.

A version that allows use in mid-air.

A version that increases the cost while extending the range.

A version that temporarily leaves a trail behind the user that causes damages to those who touch it at the cost of reduced range and increased cost. Think TRON-style.

A version that works closer to teleportation, allowing users to transport short distances and through objects based on current direction your heading (walking backwards would teleport you backwards). Imagine being able to phase right through the highway level's bottom street, right to the top.

I mean, that's 5 versions of the same skill, all of which would have distinct uses that enhanced mobility wouldn't negate. I could honestly make an entire category of skill purely based on mobility and nothing else.

Of course, this would all have to be balanced no differently than the current game has been, but the point I'm trying to make is that there's so much that could be done with what's there in terms of gameplay mechanics, it's hard to pin down what should be changed moving forward.
 
263/300 in SP skills unlocked right after finishing the campaign. Not too bad. But now I have to go through missions and grind cash while finding the other 34. *sigh*

Also after like 3-4 hours of trying this (and getting a "win" but being KO'd by vampire bats so the game goes "LOL YOU LOSE" right after I get the boss to 0 BEFORE that moment...)

lbdx29B.png


Feeling:

Fqbj85T.jpg


Seriously, Adam, give me the address to Code Mystics so I can take a photo of myself in front of that achievement flipping them off for it. Whew.
 
I noticed a skill called Mind Reader that lets you "listen in on target team's conversation." I'm guessing that skill let you listen in on the other team's in-game voice chat in the original game and is completely useless in this new version.
 
Zeta Oni said:
If this is all on the subject of a hypothetical follow up and not the current game...

Than I have to agree with the poster saying mobility should be enhanced. At the very least, Jump and roll should not be character specific abilities, they should be universal.

And while I understand the need to make sure the movement is balanced with skills so that defensive and specials that affect traversal aren't weakened or outight made useless, there is so much you could do with these skills moving forward that I don't believe it would end up an issue.

Take a skill like Dodge.

Ive used it in almost every arsenal I've ever made. It's the cornerstone of most of my strategies in this game. That said, it's one of the most basic moves in the game. Low cost, get it as soon as you start making arsenals, and it's common as dust.

Think about what could be altered just using that one skill and going from there:

A version of dodge that moves you underground like a crawl skill, completely avoiding projectiles and close range skills, but upon resurfacing leaves the user exposed.

A version that allows use in mid-air.

A version that increases the cost while extending the range.

A version that temporarily leaves a trail behind the user that causes damages to those who touch it at the cost of reduced range and increased cost. Think TRON-style.

A version that works closer to teleportation, allowing users to transport short distances and through objects based on current direction your heading (walking backwards would teleport you backwards). Imagine being able to phase right through the highway level's bottom street, right to the top.

I mean, that's 5 versions of the same skill, all of which would have distinct uses that enhanced mobility wouldn't negate. I could honestly make an entire category of skill purely based on mobility and nothing else.

Of course, this would all have to be balanced no differently than the current game has been, but the point I'm trying to make is that there's so much that could be done with what's there in terms of gameplay mechanics, it's hard to pin down what should be changed moving forward.
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Really cool idea, this is where having variations on existing cards comes in and could potentially lead to a new system for another game (should it ever happen).
 
Elija2 said:
I noticed a skill called Mind Reader that lets you "listen in on target team's conversation." I'm guessing that skill let you listen in on the other team's in-game voice chat in the original game and is completely useless in this new version.
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Yeah, that's what it does/did. I loved that skill back in the day. How come it doesn't work now?
 
jengo said:
Yeah, that's what it does/did. I loved that skill back in the day. How come it doesn't work now?
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Can't really re-implement the original game's voice codec probably, or might be squicky with modern privacy concerns. The lobbies even have text added that says to use party chat to talk to your teammates.
 
TheSeks said:
There's nothing wrong with the original. :I
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I don't like the HUD, the way you have to talk to everyone to find the side quest, the mobility should consist of a roll and jump on all characters, the same maps over and over again, not that many enemy types, etc...

In the sequel they should add co-op, and add an upgrade system for level in which you can purchase skills based on your level, or farm for skills by defeating high level bosses. Also, add more map variety, and enem
 
Just reached Chapter 5 yesterday, and I must say, I wasn't expecting that outcome from the story. That just gave the game a boost to my overall rating, because that was just crazy lol.
 
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